Published 4:00 am, Thursday, April 15, 1999

1999-04-15 04:00:00 PDT Blace, Macedonia -- Thousands of refugees, many carrying with them accounts of executions and other atrocities by Yugoslav security forces, are again being forced from their homes in Kosovo, creating a new surge of arrivals in Macedonia and Albania that Western officials say could deepen the humanitarian crisis.

The apparent new phase in the campaign to forcibly expel ethnic Albanians from the province comes a week after Yugoslav authorities closed the borders, announced an end to military operations and said all Kosovo Albanians were welcome to return home.

Instead, refugees are describing nightmarish conditions in which Yugoslav army and paramilitary forces are terrorizing civilians short on food and water, executing people at random, and burning and shelling villages as their residents flee.

A long Yugoslav train and a handful of buses carried 3,000 people from southern Kosovo to this border crossing early yesterday afternoon, nearly five times the number that had arrived on Tuesday. Macedonian authorities said they expected an additional 7,000 refugees by the end of the day, while aid workers and other officials said 30,000 or more refugees from eastern Kosovo could be headed toward the border.

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At least 3,000 refugees also arrived in northern Albania, raising to at least 4,000 the number of new arrivals this week. A French TV report from western Kosovo last night said an estimated 18,000 people were walking on snowy mountain paths toward Montenegro, the smaller, sister republic of Serbia in the Yugoslav federation.

The new surge in refugees was accompanied by dire warnings from Western relief officials about conditions in Kosovo, a province of Serbia where at least a half-million people are homeless. U.S. officials said the internal refugees, many of them believed to be huddled in the open in remote mountain locations, are in "grave danger" of starvation unless NATO airdrops food to them. NATO said the lack of shelter is encouraging the spread of typhoid, cholera, scabies and pulmonary infections.

Many of the refugees arriving in Macedonia described a stepped-up campaign by Yugoslav forces to roust the remaining population of the city of Urosevac in south-central Kosovo, which had an estimated population of 50,000 in early March, shortly before NATO began its air offensive against Yugoslavia. Troops forced many residents of the city to flee 10 days ago, but it began to fill up again last weekend as residents were forced from surrounding villages and towns.

A Western official said that the Belgrade government's rationale for its latest round of forced expulsions from Kosovo can only be guessed, but one aim may be to keep NATO combat troops in Macedonia preoccupied with humanitarian relief instead of preparations for a possible invasion.

"They are turning the tap on and off," another Western official here said, referring to Belgrade's ability to control the size and timing of the exodus.

In the past three weeks, 305,000 Kosovo refugees have arrived in Albania and 121,000 in Macedonia, straining the resources of the two poor countries and forcing NATO to create refugee camps. Montenegro has taken in 61,000.

Four members of an ethnic Albanian family that crossed the Macedonian border yesterday, for example, recounted seeing six ethnic Albanian men gunned down in a field outside the village of Pojetisht, east of Urosevac, because the men had been slow to leave their farms.

Refugees arriving in northern Albania brought similar allegations of atrocities.

Vlora Aliaj, 23, from the village of Istag, said her family was turned back at the Albanian border last week, when the government announced a cease-fire and said they could return home. Instead, she said, "they put us next to an army ammunition depot where we stood for a week."

They spent the past week in a school, where soldiers shot a 14- year-old boy to death, she said.